Contribution
May I start by reflecting on something that I feel, along with many Members across the House and, certainly, our constituents? That is how utterly depressing it is that we are having to have this debate at all. Just a few years after we went through all this under Boris Johnson and the Conservatives, and less than two years after the British people voted them out of office for indulging in this sort of chaos and distraction, here we are again.
Vladimir Putin is waging war on our continent. Donald Trump is waging war with Iran. We desperately need to strengthen our own national defences. Families and businesses are struggling against a cost of living crisis. Petrol prices have soared, and people are really worried about what Trump’s war will mean for their holidays this summer and their energy and food bills this winter. Our NHS is still in crisis. We all have constituents who are waiting weeks to see a GP, people who are dying on corridors in our hospitals, and loved ones who are not getting the care they need. We should be talking about them today. Theirs are the problems that the Government should be focused on every single day.
That is what Labour promised, after all. In their manifesto, they said that the problems in our country are a
“direct result of a governing party that, time and again, puts its own interests and obsessions above the issues that affect families.”
They promised to change that, but here we are again. Instead of fixing the NHS and social care, instead of properly funding our defence, and instead of cutting prices at the pump, here we are, having to ask why the Prime Minister appointed the close friend of a notorious paedophile sex trafficker to one of the most important and sensitive jobs in his Government.
Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had been well reported and highlighted to the Prime Minister. He had already been forced to resign in disgrace twice from the previous Labour Government, and we now know that he was deemed a national security risk by the Government’s vetting agency. So we do, sadly, have to ask: why did the Prime Minister appoint Mandelson? Why did he announce the appointment before the national security vetting had been done, despite the then Cabinet Secretary Simon Case having told him that that should happen first? And why was he so determined to get Mandelson in post that he created, as Olly Robbins described it this morning, “an atmosphere of pressure” and a certain dismissiveness about the developed vetting process—a vetting process that the Prime Minister has since blamed for his mistakes?
Even after all this, even after yesterday’s statement, the Prime Minister still has not told us why he appointed Mandelson. He admitted that appointing Mandelson was a mistake and has apologised for it. He has tried to make the rest about process and officials, but he still has not answered the fundamental question: why?
I think we know a big part of the answer, do we not? It is Donald Trump. This all comes back to the way that the Prime Minister decided to approach his relationship with the President when he returned to office last year. Our party urged the Prime Minister to stand up to Trump, to stand together with our allies, and to approach him from a position of strength, not weakness. But he chose the opposite course. He decided to try to appease Trump, to flatter him, to stroke his ego, and to hope that he will be nice to us in return. Clearly, he thought that Peter Mandelson was the man for that job. So that is it: the decision to try to curry favour with Trump instead of standing up to him is the original sin that has landed the Prime Minister and his Government in the mess they are in today. Has it worked? Absolutely not.